Explain query results on activity pages

[dwhly]

Feature Request Form

Problem you are trying to address with this feature

Because our API returns only 200 annotations per query, the number of annotations shown for each document (and also in uncollapsed view, the specific annotations on a given document) will often be incomplete.

Thus, users will naturally think they are looking at all of the annotations of a given document, and will fail to realise that they're not.

Your solution

It would help clarify what users are seeing if, somewhere unobtrusive, like perhaps at the bottom of the page we specified exactly what the results are. @seanh and I discussed a sentence saying something like:

"This page shows 200 annotations across 5 documents between now and Dec 4, 16:32pm"

For the second page, it might say:

"This page shows 200 annotations across 8 documents between Dec 2, 6:32am and Dec 4, 16:32pm"

That way the users will at least have a hint as to why the number of annotations doesn't reflect what they remember seeing on the actual document itself.

Also, within the uncollapsed document view, we might provide some similar text, such as: "7 users created 10 matching annotations on this document between Dec 4, 16:32pm and Dec 6, 8:12am. [See all]" (See all >> Same link as the view annotations in context link).

A challenge with this last recommendation would be where to display it for documents with only one small card, since there might not be sufficient vertical space to the side.

[seanh]

My take on this:

What the new activity pages actually show is "bursts of activity" (users creating annotations on documents). They do not show comprehensive records of all the annotations of each document.

For example:

What this "document bucket" from the new search page is telling the user is that in the last 7 days one user created 5 annotations on this Digital Writing Assessment document (and they didn't use any tags).

The important things to note are:

1. This does not mean that there are only 5 annotations of the document in total. There may be more annotations of the document that either were not created in the last 7 days, or did not fit into the first page (first 200 annotations) of the search results.

   If there are more annotations of this document, they will appear when the document is repeated further down the page, or possibly on a later page of the results.

2. Similarly it does not mean that this one user is the only user that annotated this document, they're the only user who annotated it in the last 7 days.

3. Similarly it does not mean that no tags have been used on this document.

I think the crucial point here is that the document bucket represents a burst of activity in which, within a timeframe (last 7 days), some users (one in this case), created some number of annotations of the document.

It doesn't represent a comprehensive record of all the annotations of the document, or all the users who've annotated the document, etc.

But that is exactly what users looking at these pages will think it does represent!

Users will think that these are comprehensive records and won't realise that they are partial bursts of activity.

That's the user problem here.

And the solution is to somehow change or add to the design or wording to make it clear that what the user is actually looking at is a searchable activity stream rather than more traditional search results.

Possible solutions are adding a page-level line of text, or adding a line in each document bucket, as Dan suggests above.

I hope we can do this with just a small tweak or addition to the text in our pages, and not a big design change, but in searching for the wording I think it's instructive to look at how activity streams are presented on other websites. Note the use of SUBJECT - VERB - OBJECT phrases: "Sean Hammond attached <some image file> to <some Trello card>" etc. (It does not say "<Trello card title>: 1 attachment" and it doesn't mean that Trello card has only one attachment)

The presentation of our activity pages currently looks like comprehensive records, does not look like summarised bursts of activity.

CKAN:

Trello:

GitHub: